1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a duplicator system which transfers information signals recorded on a mother tape to a copy tape. More particularly, the invention relates to a duplicator system which is manageable of the number of uses, or life, or a mother tape.
2. Background Art
A high speed duplicator system for video tapes is well known in the art in which a mother tape, on which reversed magnetic patterns of information signals representative of a movie, for example, are repeatedly recorded on blank, or copy, tape via a duplicator head to produce many reproductions of the material on the mother tape.
In such a duplicator system, the life of a mother tape is about 5000 traveling cycles (i.e., the number of duplicating cycles) due to wear of a tape material or degradation in magnetic patterns and thus a one-reel mother tape provides five thousand duplicated video tapes.
Of course, if less than five thousand video tapes are copied from a one-reel mother tape in sequential operation, this mother tape can be again used in a subsequent duplicating operation, but only until the maximum of about five thousand cycles in total, has been reached.
Therefore, it is necessary to establish the number of cycles remaining in the life of the mother tape precisely before starting a transferring operation. In a prior art duplicator system, the number of traveling cycles of a mother tape during sequential operation is counted by a counter provided in the system to be indicated to an operator for managing the life of the mother tape.
Such a system for managing the life of individual mother tapes by means of a counter requires a high degree of attention from the operator to correctly observe and record the lifecycles of various mother tapes in order to prevent a mother tape from being used beyond its appropriate lifespan with the result that the mother tape breaks or dropout occurs in copied tapes. The potential for operator error in such a system is undesirably high.
For improving quality control of duplicated tapes, Japanese patent First Publication No. 1-502703 which is a convention application based on British Patent Application No. GB 8701983 filed on Jan. 29, 1987 discloses a system which is adapted for recording identification codes of a mother tape and a used duplicator system and a code indicating production date and time of on a copied tape. It will be appreciated that this prior art system has the disadvantage that it does not record the number of reproduction cycles executed by a mother tape.